There are some studies I am more open to participating in. Those studies are from organizations that provide legal support and social services.

If an organization such as GLAAD or Lambda Legal is putting up a lot of time and money to pursue anti-discrimination cases and anti-violence measures that help protect LGBT/T people and I want to make sure they are meeting the needs of TS/TG people then I answer their questionnaires and studies.

At forty years post-transsexual and over 65 most studies regarding TS/TG health issues might as well be written in ancient Greek because I’m so far past those issues as to not have a clue as to what they are talking about.

As for transgender and aging? No thanks I’d rather be around aging hippies and lefties because that too was a part of my life experience and in many ways had more impact on my life.

People tend to forget how diverse TS/TG people are. Last night I ran a teaser for article from the New York Times about an organization in Israel that helped sex workers including TS/TG sex workers find employment in the fashion industry. While I like clothes working in the fashion industry, other than perhaps doing photography holds about as much interest for me as having dental work with out anesthesia.

Too many studies treat us as though we have a common shared culture when what we often have are other TS/TG friends and a shared interest in ending the anti-TS/TG discrimination, bigotry and violence.

This is a short coming of identity politics, an assumed sameness vs. a real diversity among those who are thought to share a common identity. It breaks down even further when the people of trans prefixed words are asked to describe themselves. Various people of trans-prefixed words us dozens if not hundreds of different terms to describe themselves.

Mostly the studies which I am most likely to find anathema are those presented to us by academics, especially in fields like gender studies or queer studies. Even worse are those studies presented to us by grad students hoping to become part of either academe or the Psychiatric Industrial Complex.

Over the years I have developed a rather low opinion of the Psychiatric Industrial Complex, I tend to view it as an instrument of control, something that peddles conformity and non-rebellion against loathsome conditions over all else. Too often the Psychiatric Industrial Complex has chosen to align itself with bigotry and and misogyny in a manner which makes it an adjunct to religion rather than fighting faith based bigotry and ignorance.

Too many people trained in the field have shown themselves open to prostituting themselves to the opinion building fields of advertising and propaganda. Psychiatrists have also prostituted themselves to the Military Industrial Complex creating Psy-ops and developing means of torture (see Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine).

Outside of our helping political organization discover shared needs why should we participate?

Particularly when our participating tends to demean and other us as some sort of gender transgressive deviant subculture.

Transgender individuals are routinely denied medically necessary health care based solely on their gender identity, but that’s about to change — in a big way — in Oregon.

In the week before Christmas, the Oregon Insurance Division of the Department of Consumer and Business Services quietly issued a bulletin clarifying that Senate Bill 2 — the law passed in 2007 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (defined to include gender identity) — requires equal treatment for transgender Oregonians in medical treatment.

“This is, I think, a huge victory for the transgender community in Oregon. This is really making clear what trans folks know – that we deserve equal healthcare access,” says Basic Rights Oregon‘s Trans Justice Manager tash shatz. “It’s such an incredible thing that it’s kind of hard to describe how big a deal it is.”

The clarification comes more than 5 years after the passage of the non-discrimination law, following pressure from BRO’s Trans Working Group and complaints from transgender Oregonians denied coverage of medical treatments on the basis of their gender identity. While it’s not clear how the bulletin (officially released Dec. 19) will affect federally managed insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid (Oregon Health Plan), it does apply to all private insurers transacting in Oregon.

The list of actions that, when based on actual or perceived gender identity, would constitute prohibited discrimination include:

TEL AVIV — For 20 years Aviva, 48, flamboyant and transgendered, worked the streets of the business district of this Mediterranean city, as well as the seedy square mile around the central bus station and the Tel Baruch beach, once a notorious hub of Israeli prostitution that has become a spruced up stretch of sandy coast.

Alona, 40, immigrated to Israel with her parents from Ukraine in the early 1990s. Her circumstances quickly degenerated from working in a casino to a life derailed by debts, drugs and prostitution. When she was not in prison, the squalid streets around the bus station became her home.

“In the streets there was no toilet, no toilet paper,” Alona said. “I forgot a lot of things, like how to look after myself, to love myself. I learned to survive.”

Now, in an endeavor as far removed from their former lives as the gleaming banks and trendy boutiques of Tel Aviv are from the city’s sleazy subculture, the two, who asked to be identified only by their first names, recently completed a free course in styling and the retail clothing business. Along with other former prostitutes who have received similar training in dress design and sewing, they are now aiming to find a place in the world of fashion. There is always demand for sales staff in Tel Aviv’s bustling stores, and one talented graduate even went on to a professional design school on a scholarship.

“The course gave me a lot of self-confidence and knowledge,” Aviva said. “Maybe one day I’ll be able to start something of my own. When they gave me the certificate — the first in my life — I was proud of myself. I’d done something positive.”

The idea for the program grew up from the underside of Tel Aviv.

The program’s initiator, Lilach Tzur Ben-Moshe, was working as a fashion writer and editor at a leading Hebrew news Web site and volunteering at the city’s rape crisis center when, four years ago, she moved to the dilapidated Shapira Quarter near the bus station. Her squalid new neighborhood exposed her to the full misery of the sex trade, and she determined to help women to leave it.

“I didn’t want just to answer the phone in the help center,” she said. “I wanted to offer something more optimistic, more beautiful, the opposite of that awful world of prostitution.”

Over at the Associated Press, they’ve eliminated “homophobia.” David Minthorn, co-editor of the AP Stylebook, the vade mecum of the journalism world, says that the word—and others like it such as “Islamophobia”—ascribes “a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge that we don’t have.”

The AP says “homophobia” is inaccurate and instead suggests “anti-gay,” a term both more neutral and more pointed: it labels people and policies as being against gays, for whatever reason, and implies a prompt to explain those reasons.

“Homophobia” was first coined by psychologist George Weinberg in the 1960s and popularized in his 1972 book, Society and the Healthy Homosexual. Weinberg—who isn’t gay—wanted to push back on the centuries-old idea that homosexuality was a disorder by putting the problem not on queers but on those who opposed us. The year after his book was published, homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

There is, to be sure, something a little ridiculous about the AP’s logic. In common usage, “homophobia” no longer holds the clinical connotations it once had. Surely the AP doesn’t really believe that readers assume a psychiatric diagnosis is being made when they read that someone or something is homophobic. These days, “homophobia” is rarely read that narrowly, in the same way that “xenophobia,” for example, might enter into an article about foreign policy without any clinical connotations. Instead, “homophobia” has become a catch-all term for anti-gay sentiment, heterosexism, or hate (fear-based or otherwise) directed at LGBTQ people.

Eliminating the idea of fear from the discussion of people and policies that deny equal status to LGBTQ people has a number of potential effects. On the one hand, it eliminates the possibility of linguistically legitimizing anti-gay behaviors and structures through the notion of a phobia. It also removes an easy out for people who don’t experience or recognize their bias as being rooted in fear. On the other, it has the potential to erase the fact that fear, or at least anxiety, does play a part in many aspects of bigotry of any kind. Placing “anti-gay” alongside its frequent comparatives, “racist,” “sexist” and “ableist,” it is hard to argue that they don’t all have some relationship to fear—anxiety about embodied difference, about violence, about economic standing, about gender roles, about the dismantling of centuries-old hierarchies and power relations.

Not too long ago, I asked a friend how she’s doing. After a long pause, she said, “I keep wondering if this is all there is.”

A lot of us have that feeling.

She and I are both 50-something and like many 50-somethings, we are empty-nesters or about to be empty-nesters; we’re either 20-something years into a marriage or any number of years divorced. We’re in midlife, crisis or not; a time when we question what we’ve done — and, more likely, haven’t done — and where to we want to be.

Our conversation was oddly timed, coming just days after Monique Honaman’s provocative post, “I Just Wish He Would Have an Affair”, in which she detailed how many wives have confided in her that they just don’t want to be married anymore:

These women are done. They say they aren’t happy. They say they aren’t in love with their husbands (or any other man — they aren’t having affairs). They say they simply wish they were no longer married to him. They aren’t fulfilled. They wonder if this is how they are doomed to live the rest of their lives (and God-willing, most of them have another 40+ years ahead of them). … The common factor amongst all of these women is that they say that their husbands are really solid, good, nice men … they just don’t want to be married to them anymore because they have fallen out of love.

Honaman doesn’t say how old these women are or how long they’ve been married, but since she indicates they have another 40-plus years ahead of them, it seems that they are middle-aged, too.

Bryan Fischer yesterday on his radio program threatened that “flaming homosexuals… wearing stilettos, a dress and dangly earrings” would apply for jobs in Christian bookstores if ENDA passes into law. Fischer, the public face of the certified anti-gay hate group, American Family Association, claimed “the homosexual lobby” would purposely target religious businesses, including “Christian bookstores,” if the Employment Non-Discrimination Act were passed by Congress and signed into law.

Ryan today reiterated his support for ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

This is a horrible bill for a social conservative to support since it would mean the absolute end of religious liberty and freedom of association in the marketplace. It would, in other words, gut the First Amendment. It’s shameful for Ryan, who also voted for this Constitution-shredding bill in 2007, to be so blissfully and blindly unaware of the consequences of this legislation.